“Then I guess while everyone else is packing, I’ll get on the horn to Austin and see what I can do,” I said. “You riding with us?”
“I’ll ride with my client,” she replied, pointing at the paper in my hand.
“Gotcha,” I said, walking back to the Gas N’ Go to give Bubba the good news that we’d be leaving, and then to try to stop the horror show I knew was coming.
I argued myself blue in the face, but the higher ups in Austin and Dallas thought this was the best plan. I was having too many visions of the Battle of Mogadishu to feel their confidence that the helicopters were going to be able to pick up Fedora and move him quickly and safely to Austin. No, I hadn’t been in the Mog; that was an Army operation all the way. Besides, I was thirteen when all that went down.
An hour later I was standing in the Gas N’ Go parking lot watching Broomrider descend. When the wheels hit the ground, four of the dwarves trotted over and grabbed the null box from the passenger compartment and carried it into the store, returning with it a few minutes later. Fields walked with the box and sat next to it, waiting while the crew chief buckled her in. While that was going on, Granite Twenty-Seven moved from the garage into its place for the convoy to Austin. The crew chief gave me the thumbs up before settling in behind his minigun. The rotor pitch changed and Broomrider climbed into the sky, settling into formation with Dragon as they pointed their noses east for Austin.
I walked to where Bubba stood in the door of the store and shook his hand.
“I’ll see ya when I see ya,” he said. “Just don’t make it too soon, huh?”
“You got it,” I replied, grinning. “Someone should be here from HQ about your drain problem tomorrow.”
“I’m hoping it goes away on its own, now that you’ve taken what it wants away from here,” he said, turning and walking into the store.
Dalma was waiting in the lead Tahoe, “The Bad Touch” thumping from the speakers. I swung up and into Granite Twenty-Seven. Once I was inside, the driver hit the horn twice, and the column set off.
“The transfer went well,” I said to Fields. “Hopefully that’s a good omen.”
Yeah, Austin and Dallas had really thought this one out—they’d sent a doppelganger for Fields to the Gas N’ Go. The birds were a distraction. The ground convoy was where all the fun was.
“Having to back the vehicles into the garage bay to load them helped immensely,” she said.
“There weren’t any problems with your client going into the box?”
“He…balked at first. Your wife reminded him of what happened to his friend. Diindiisi is special,” Fields said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I replied, turning to Other Dave. “You got Dragon’s frequency cued up?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You really think something’s going to happen to them?”
“I do. The other side could tell when Fedora…”
“Richard Lucille,” Fields said, interrupting me.
“Who?”
“Richard Lucille. Fedora’s name is Richard Lucille,” she replied, sipping from a travel mug. “Before you ask, it’s his true name, which is why I insisted we move him in a null box.”
“The other side could tell when Mr. Lucille dropped off their radar, and they know what a null box is. If they had someone watching the Gas N’ Go, they could observe the transfer and report it without using magic,” I said. “Cell phones are wonderful devices for sharing intelligence, so yes, I expect them to try to hit Dragon Flight.”
“Did you watch Black Hawk Down last night or something?” Fields asked. “The other side hasn’t shown any willingness to use anything but magic recently.”
“That doesn’t mean they don’t learn,” I said.
“What about tracking Ms. Fields here?” Other Dave asked, trying to avoid a fight in the confines of the Granite.
“Not without a lot of magic, and that would set off all kinds of wards,” she said, tapping the null box we sat on. “This really is the best way for us to get Mr. Lucille back to Austin.”
The hard part about listening to someone else in combat is not being able to do a damn thing about it. Dragon Flight had been gone about half an hour when they ran into trouble.
“Broomrider to Dragon. We’ve got something at four o’clock low.”
That was the first sign of trouble. The choppers were cruising at around three hundred feet, according to the later reports. Four o’clock low put whatever was following them on the deck.
“Dragon to Broomrider, you’re cleared to fire if necessary.”
‘Something’ was a single engine Beechcraft Bonanza, whose pilot was suffering from depression due to the loss of his son and daughter-in-law in the recent flooding in San Marcos, according to friends. Since all we ever found of him was the crisped remains, we weren’t able to tell if he’d been depressed or coerced into smashing his plane into Broomrider. Fire cures all.
“Approaching flight, this is US Marshall’s flight. Sheer off, or we will fire.”
Apparently the Bonanza firewalled his throttle at that point. Broomrider tried to swing and bring his starboard door gun to bear, but the Bonanza was moving too fast. Even then, the Bonanza almost missed—almost being the operative word. The Bonanza’s pilot clipped Broomrider’s tail rotor. The tail rotor failed explosively, and the bird yawed violently to the right and pitched nose down, which resulted in Broomrider slamming into the Hill Country at just under 100 miles per hour. The Beechcraft rose above the point of impact, then rolled, nosing into a farmhouse about a mile from the point of impact.
“Broomrider is down. Permission to insert the security team and check for survivors?” Dragon asked Austin.
“Negative. Orbit the site, but do not land or insert your team,” was Austin’s reply.
“Hippie (Austin command’s call sign), there is movement around the crash site. Permission to engage?”
“Negative.”
“Damnit, Hippie! Those are our people down there!”
Dragon may not have landed or inserted her team, but you could hear the guns going in the background every time she keyed the mike.
“Understood, Dragon. You may fire defensively, but do not insert or land!”
“Roger, Hippie…holy shit, they set off a bomb down there!”
Whoever was on the ground had found the null box the dwarves had loaded on board Broomrider and tried to open it to get at Lucille. Command, probably in Austin or Dallas, had decided, in their infinite wisdom, that if something happened to the flight and the box opened, someone was going to get a surprise—a hundred or so pounds of C4, topped with all the scrap they could lay their hands on—an improvised explosive device to send them to hell, essentially.
“Dragon, status check?”
“We’re airborne, Hippie. Enemy elements are withdrawing.”
“Roger, continue to orbit, Hippie out.”
“Dragon out.”
“Don’t say a word,” I said to Fields before moving to the seat next to the driver.
We rode back to Austin in silence.
* * * * *
Chapter Sixteen
Dragon was waiting for me when I unassed the Granite in the garage.
“Look, Karen,” I started.
She knocked me flat on my ass.
“You got one of my aircrews killed, you fuck,” she said.
“It wasn’t my plan,” I replied, rubbing my jaw. She had a punch like a mule.
“You gave the orders. It was your plan.”
“It was set up before I got done washing the remains of a lipid golem off, Karen,” I said. “Goddamnit, if you want to punch someone, punch Goodhart or Jed. I called them and told them the plan sucked the sweat off a zombie’s balls.”
Her crew and Kolchak’s were standing behind her. My team and Fred’s dwarves were behind me, and I wasn’t moving. All it would take was one person doing the wrong thing, and we would be throwing down like the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story. The dif
ference being we all knew how to commit maximum carnage in a minimum amount of time, and wouldn’t waste time dancing about to show how tough we were.
“Warriors, come out to plaayay…” Jed said from the back of the garage, banging a pair of wrenches together.
“We’re finished here,” Karen said, leading the flight crews out of the garage.
“You okay?” Diindiisi asked, helping me up from the floor.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “Doesn’t help that I told them what happened would happen.”
“Dallas overruled Goodhart before you called in,” Jed said. “The flight crews will get over it.”
“We both know that’s bullshit,” I said.
“Yeah. We can hope,” he replied. “So, where’s the idiot?”
“Still in the null box in the Granite,” I replied. “He’s your problem now.”
I stormed out of the garage, snagging my go bag on the way. Diindiisi followed me out to the parking lot and whistled.
“What?”
“Car’s over here,” she replied, pointing at a Tacticool Tahoe and holding up a set of keys. “You want me to drive?”
“Hon, I love you, but Jesus Christ, no,” I said, taking the keys and walking to the Tahoe she’d pointed out.
Diindiisi is learning to drive. Unfortunately, she still has some of the habits she learned driving a team, and occasionally forgets that the vehicle won’t steer itself. What makes it worse is that Dalma and Padgett are both vying to see who can teach her to drive. Which means she’s doing well on the tactical driving course, and horrible in Austin traffic. I drove home on autopilot, weaving through Austin traffic while I thought about what had happened.
Once we got to the safe house, I decided I needed a shower. I was standing head down under the water, considering killing brain cells with alcohol—we were off until we showed back up at work the next morning, and I intended to go in late—when Diindiisi eeled through the shower curtain behind me and put her arms around me. I jumped. Her arms were cold, and I was used to the temperature of the shower.
“How can you be so warm in bed that you sleep under a sheet with the windows open when it’s thirty damn degrees outside, but your arms are like ice when you touch me?” I said as she started washing my back.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ve always had that talent.”
“I wouldn’t call it a talent,” I replied.
“So,” she started, taking the showerhead down and rinsing my back.
“So? So am I pissed at HQ? Yeah, you could say that. Am I going to let it keep me from doing my job? I thought about quitting for about two minutes after the bird went down. It wouldn’t change things, and it would mean having to stay one step ahead of Abzu and Oeillet on our own. Which would get expensive, most ricky-tick,” I said, turning and kissing her lightly on the forehead.
“Good,” she replied, putting the showerhead back and turning in my arms. “Wash my hair?”
I wet her hair down and worked shampoo through it, working out the tangles, and then squeezed to the side so she could rinse out the shampoo. I’d been under the water long enough that the tiles weren’t cold on my back, which was a good thing.
“So what are you going to do about the pilots?” Diindiisi asked, water streaming from her face.
“Not a damn thing I can do. They’re going to have to get over it—they can check the records if they don’t believe me, but at this point, they’re the ones who are going to have to find the truth. I’ve given it to them, that’s all I can do.”
“Any other plans?” she asked, turning off the water.
“I thought I’d help you get dry and see what that leads to,” I said, grinning.
“Well, there’s always dinner,” Diindiisi replied coyly.
“True,” I said with a sigh.
“You should see the look on your face right now!” she said, laughing.
* * * * *
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning we pulled up to “Add it Up” by the Violent Femmes. The complete disorder in the parking lot was normal, but everyone inside the building running around like chickens with their heads cut off wasn’t. I grabbed a passing office worker.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?” I asked.
“There’s a problem down in the lower levels,” he said, pulling loose and trotting off. “They’ve ordered the building evacuated.”
“Fucking peachy,” I said, turning and striding to Goodhart’s office.
Goodhart was there, along with Michelangelo and Jed. They all turned when I walked through the door. Michelangelo had on working clothes—complete with body armor. Shit was serious.
“Where the hell have you been?” Goodhart asked.
“First sign I got of trouble was when I came through the gate,” I replied.
“Bullshit. I sent you a text,” Jed said.
My phone started playing “Gallows Pole.” I pulled it out of my pocket, and sure enough, there was the message Jed had sent, twenty minutes after he’d sent it.
“First I’ve heard of it,” I said, tossing him my phone.
“Fucking AT&T,” he replied, tossing the phone back.
“So, what’s up?”
“Something’s breaking rock down in the lower levels, trying to get in,” Michelangelo said dryly. “Fred volunteered to check the escape shafts, and whatever is trying to get in hasn’t made it past the spells, but if this continues, I’m going to give the order to blow the main shaft. There are things down there we don’t want seeing the light of day again.”
If the old vampire was talking about things that had to stay in the dark, we were in trouble with a capitol T.
“When’s the last time you had someone check your escape tunnels?” Fred entered the room, finger-combing cobwebs from his beard. “Some of the spiders in there are big enough for a gnome to ride.”
“Did you find anything?” Goodhart asked him.
“Yeah, you’re pretty much fucked. There’s some lesser types following, but there’s a pair of Piroboli leading the attempt to break in. The water table isn’t slowing them much, and they’ll probably burn through that shortly,” he said, pouring a cup of coffee.
“How do you spell that?” Jed asked, walking to a computer.
“They’re gendered fire daemons,” Fred said, sighing. “You’re generally ok if you only encounter one of them—but when they get together, they set things on fire.”
“Okay,” I said. “I take it the fire is hot enough to melt stone?”
“From what we can tell at the listening post, they’re having issues with the limestone. The Piroboli are turning it to calcium oxide, and then a lithovore of some type is eating that,” Fred replied, sipping his coffee. “There’s a pause between the rock heating and the tunnel expanding.”
“We can try fighting the Piroboli with water,” Goodhart said.
“Only if you’ve got an ocean nearby,” Fred replied. “The Karst formation of the Edwards Aquifer y’all are sitting on isn’t slowing them down overmuch.”
“What do you suggest?” Michelangelo asked.
“How much dry ice or liquid nitrogen do you have on hand?” Fred replied with a truly evil grin on his face.
“R&D has a couple of hundred-pound cylinders of liquid nitrogen, is that enough?” Goodhart asked after pulling the information up on his computer.
“No. We’re going to need a lot more than that,” Fred said.
“How much more?”
“Oh, a couple of truckloads at a minimum. I’ll get the forge to design a delivery system. We’re going to need a lot of hose, and a pump, and…” Fred said, walking out the door.
“This is going to blow the budget for the quarter to hell and back,” Goodhart said, picking up a phone. “The only good thing is our gas supplier is used to delivering on short notice when Sola gets a wild hair up his ass.”
“We going to try to evac the lower levels?” I asked Michelangelo.
“We’ve alr
eady put the more…tractable beings down there in null boxes to move them. Three of them have grown to such a size they won’t fit into the biggest box, let alone the elevator, and are, I believe, hoping to be freed by whatever is breaking in,” he said with a shrug.
“Your boy Lucille is refusing to get in the box,” Jed said.
“Let me guess,” I replied with a frown. “We get to go down there and keep him out of the hands of the Piroboli and lithovores.”
“See, I told Goodhart you’d understand.”
“Oh yeah, Gunny. Grunts always get the shitty end of the stick,” I said walking out the door to gather my team.
We loaded up with everything we thought we might need down in the hole, and then doubled it. Johnson and Hiebert would ride the elevator back up to the top level, grab several pallets of assorted destruction, then hold the elevator for us on the bottom level, alongside a couple of dwarves. Fred would stay topside with the team building the nitrogen delivery system.
“Wait a minute,” Fred said, gesturing to a young—you can tell by the color of the beard—dwarf. “Take Ori with you.”
“I’ll bite, why?”
“You’re going to need his skills,” Fred said. “He’s the best damn grazt!kavka I’ve got.”
“What’s a…” I paused and reformed my argument. “Look, I’m not even going to try to wrap my tongue around South Texas Dwarfish, especially when there’s a glottal stop. What’s his specialty?
“Mining Accountant.”
“I get you’re charging QMG out the ass for services rendered, but I don’t understand why I need to take an accountant into combat,” I said, looking Ori over; he didn’t look like much, just another average dwarf. Hell, he wasn’t even armed.
“Language barrier,” Fred said with a laugh. “Direct translations suck. He’s not a bean counter. Mining accountants are like mining engineers, only better. If you need to drop a corridor, Ori here will show you the best way to do it without dropping all the overburden into your own laps. He might be able to keep you alive long enough for the rest of us to get the nitrogen in place and put paid to the Piroboli.”
Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2) Page 13
